The internet is protesting today against the proposed Internet Censorship bills in the US Congress
As you may have noticed, sites like Wikipedia, Google, and Craigslist have all blacked out their sites in one way or another to protest the two bills currently in the US congress that would threaten the freedom of the Internet.
We've talked about the bills before, but we're going to give you some background on what they do and why they're bad.
The bills are commonly known as SOPA (Stop Online Piracy) and PIPA (Protect IP act). They background behind these bills is justifiable. The Internet has become a wild west for the wrongful piracy of content like software, movies, and music.
However, the proposed bills go to far that they become extremely harmful. It puts a burden on content providers to actively monitor for copyright infringement, and sites could be blocked and taken down with little to no notice.
For example, YouTube would have to actively monitor that a copyrighted image or audio file isn't uploaded to the site. This means that user-generated and user-contributed sites like Wikipedia, Google, Reddit, Tumblr, and sites like ours would be easy targets for takedowns.
Wikipedia has a pretty good summary, so you should head over there, read up and contact your local representative.
